All promo videos for an exhibition should be this entertaining!

Opening August 11, “The Walker presents the latest phase and first US exhibition of Baby Marx, an ongoing project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes that looks at the potential for mass entertainment to operate as a radical educational tool.”

At the end of the video, above the subtitle Romance, it appears that Che Guevara is hitting on a school teacher/librarian, who is the only woman who appears in the trailer. I wonder if the exhibition will include female theoreticians and activists?

Actions: What You Can Do With the City Canadian Centre for Architecture Actions: What You Can Do With the City presents 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.

I didn’t see the exhibition but part of what caught my attention is the symmetry between the web interface and the proposed/enacted actions in the city, which is nevertheless not merely literal. Clicking on the ball identifies 5 actions from #79 Paint Grows Soccer Field to #48 Ping Pong Connects Neighbors.

Football Field 1. Maider López. Sharjah Art Museum, United Arab Emirates, 2007. © Maider López

You can combine tools as well, so that the coveralls link to 8 actions from #61. Bicycle Plants Wartime Gardens
(Futurefarmers’ Victory Garden project) to #40 Wheels Give Superpowers. But if you add a bench to your toolset, you get Foamy Velour Suits Challenge Authority.

The integration of interface and concept may or may not change the world, but it’s refreshing to see a site that still tries to be an experience for the experience, and the projects are great to browse through. I’m thinking of taking up #41 Guns Seed Vacant Lots this spring.

Plant the Piece is a symbolic seed-bomb production project.

March 5, 2010

Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu
Gallery Coordinator: Trish Stone, 858-336-6456, tstone@ucsd.edu

Sustainability and Art on Display at UC San Diego’s gallery@calit2

The University of California, San Diego has built a reputation for being one of the “greenest” campuses in the nation, and that reputation extends to an art gallery in the university’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is staging a new sustainability-themed art exhibition.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture. Curated by Steve Dietz, “A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice” opens Friday, April 2, 2010, with a 6 p.m. panel discussion moderated by UC San Diego visual arts professor Jordan Crandall, followed by a reception.

Dietz has selected five of Raaf’s electronic and responsive artworks to be included in this exhibition: Translator II: Grower, Icelandic Rift, Light Green Light, (n)Fold, and Meandering River.

Sabrina Raaf, Translator II Grower

Translator II Grower, a robotic sculpture, measures carbon dioxide levels inside the gallery as they are generated by visitors, and actively draws the measurements in green ink as a field of grass on the gallery walls. Examples of these ink drawings will be on display on the first floor of Atkinson Hall.

Sabrina Raaf, Icelandic Rift

The Icelandic Rift sculptures are electronically-powered works that include mechanical systems, representing far-future visions of agricultural production and mineral mining in zero-g environments.

Prototypes and concept animations for Light Green Light, a lamp that unfolds into a netted tent for sleeping, and (n)Fold, a flat-fold design for dew harvesting and passive solar cooking, are also on view in the gallery.

Sabrina Raaf, Meandering River

Meandering River is a sculptural installation made up of thermal screen material that has had its surface milled robotically with meandering river designs. Its installation form is derived from self-organizing and meandering river mathematics. This thermal screen installation is also designed to cascade vertically in order to create a climbing surface for vines and thus support the growth of a vertical garden. A cascading instance of the Meandering River sculpture is hung in the six-story window of the Atkinson Hall stairwell, and a second, river-type instance will be viewed in the hall area on the first floor.

Raaf works in experimental sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpallo (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ISEA (Helsinki), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Klein Art Works (Chicago). The artist is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Steve Dietz is Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996.

“A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice”
by Sabrina Raaf
Curated by Steve Dietz
Friday, April 2, 2010 – Friday, June 4, 2010

Friday, April 2, 6 p.m. in Calit2 Theater, Atkinson Hall, UCSD
Panel Discussion with Sabrina Raaf and Steve Dietz
Moderated by Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD
Welcome by Ramesh Rao, Director, UCSD Division, Calit2

Friday, April 2, 7 p.m. in gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, UCSD
Opening Reception

Events are FREE and open to the public.
RSVP requested to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, at tstone@ucsd.edu
http://gallery.calit2.net

Paul Pfeiffer, "Cross Hall (2008)," Wall-recessed mixed media diorama, peephole, live video feed projection. Dimensions variable. Installation view courtesy of Carlier Gebauer. Photo by Bernd Borchardt. Collection of Sammlung Goetz, Munich.via Switchboard

Looks like a great line up for a panel with a ho-hum title “Confounding Expectations X: Photography in Context The Projected Photograph” at the Vera List Center this Thursday – George Baker, Andrea Geyer, Paul Pfeiffer, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

“This panel will explore the multiple ways in which contemporary artists have utilized projection and installation strategies to display still photographic images, creating immersive and cinema-like experiences in museum and gallery environments.”

It’s still faintly amusing to me that a stellar panel like this might coalesce around the medium-specificity of the photographic image, deploying the term “immersive” in relation to cinema without, apparently, a nod to either the communicating projections of, say, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitiz’s Hole-in-Space or the dynamic environments of, say, Fashionably Late for the Relationship (installation version) by R. Luke Dubois and Lián Amaris.

The Projection Project. Installation view. Curated by Edwin Carels, Mark Kre

Nevertheless, it is a rich topic. See MHKA’s The Projection Project exhibition with work by Marie José Burki, Marc De Blieck, Thierry De Cordier, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Kristina Ianatchkova & Vitto Valentinov, Timothée Ingen-Housz, Yeondoo Jung, André Kruysen,Bertrand Lavier, Bruce Nauman, Stephen & Timothy Quay, Joost Rekveld, Matthew Stokes, Fiona Tan, Krassimir Terziev, Ana Torfs, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Benjamin Verdonck, Cerith Wyn Evans and Thomas Zummer.

I contributed a talk “Into the Streets,” which attempted to construct a discernible trajectory from the kind of gallery-based work that Chrissie Illes presented in her mesmerizing 2001 exhibition, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, to contemporary practice, such as Wodiczko’s CECUCT project and the kind of work I am interested in at Northern Lights as well as the 01SJ Biennial.

And hopefully, Pfeiffer will at least mention his The Saints project, which remains an animating experience for me and taught me that even in a large-scale, public context, spectacular size is not everything. The visual element of The Saints was physically minor, even though critical to the overall experience.

Christopher Baker, Hello World! at Franklin Arts in Artcetera

via Artcetera

Chris was a recipient of one of the first round of Art(ists) On the Verge grants.

Related

• FEEDFORWARD – Angel of History
• Tech Artist?

Good progress installing FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History at LABoral. Lots of artists in town now. Crew doing a remarkable job.

The architecture of LABoral, or more fully LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, was originally designed by Luis Moya as an orphanage for miners’ children, although subsequently altered and expanded to house a series of vocational training centers in concrete braced vaults, which were inspired by the Caracalla Baths in Rome. The resulting 6 exhibition spaces, in the North-East end of the old workshops and the ball court, have over 4,000 square meters with the two  being used for FEEDFORWARD each in excess of 1,000 square meters.

We are working with Angel Borrego of the Office for Strategic Spaces for the exhibition design. The space will be divided by a series of translucent scrims, with projection screens embedded in them as necessary. In the exhibition catalog, Angel writes, in part:

“The schizophrenia inherent in the function of museum architecture and, to a lesser extent, of an exhibition design is predicated on the fact that exploring the spatial and conceptual potential proffered by an exhibition seems to actually increase the distance between the beholder and the exhibited work. If the quantity, and depth, of the design creates a proportional distance between the spectator and a direct experience and reading of the work, how then can we address this commission? How can an exhibition be designed to do away with the undesirable imposition of design? In other words, how can one design the disappearance of design itself?

“Feedforward – The Angel of History has given us a second chance to address this critical problem and, most importantly, it proportions a glimpse of a solution. The curators . . . and ourselves at OSS, were opposed to any radical division of the pieces into isolated thematic groups and yet at once refused to entirely relinquish the possibility of providing an organised reading of the issues. We wanted it all, an order imposed on the works but also the coexistence of all the works in a single landscape. Walter Benjamin’s The Angel of History, the source inspiration for the show, offers one of the most physical and intense translations of the advance of time in space. We wanted any visit to the exhibition, any movement of the public, to operate as a representation of the Angel of History, in short, an overall view of the past strewn at his feet.”

I’m excited – and nervous – to see how this looks on Monday, but in the meantime, LABoral sent some pictures of the installation progress.

“Anyway, I had my metaphorical books open until I moved over to the Artists on the Verge exhibition. It changed the channel in my head, and I felt like someone had nudged me gently awake. All of the artwork necessitated involvement of people in some way (way to go new wave of contemporary art! I like you more than the movements 5 years ago!) which got me thinking about how we, museum people, have sometimes layered the audience experience on top of the artwork. To help inspire or explain if it was more difficult to get at. Why this exhibition seemed so effortless in that respect, was because the viewer was primary to the artwork itself. Of course I felt like I had been woken up! The artwork wanted me to. It needed me to.”

via I am almost always on time

Tomorrow night, Thursday, July 9, from 8-10 pm, there will be an opening reception for Art(ists) On the Verge at the Weisman Art Museum.

http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/
http://weisman.umn.edu/exhibits/AOV/home.html
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Northern-Lights/41442276136#/event.php?eid=203135440643&ref=mf

Opening Night Performances

8:30 pm Krista Kelley Walsh, Public Eye Action, Northrop Mall and Weisman Art Museum
9:00 pm Aniccha Arts will perform an excerpt of Cloud Turn, Weisman Art Museum
9:30 triquetera, an allegorical exercise. Andrea Steudel and David Steinman with sounds by John Keston present an original outdoor video performance on the facade of the Weisman Art Museum

Art(ists) On the Verge

Artists on the Verge 2008-2009 at the Weisman Art Museum features works or documentation of works made by the inaugural group of Art(ists) on the Verge fellows. Installations of all six commissions are included. Artists are Aniccha Arts (Pramila Vasudevan, Director), Avye Alexandres, Christopher Baker, Kevin Obstatz, Andrea Steudel, and Krista Kelley Walsh.

Art(ists) on the Verge (AOV) is a new Northern Lights fellowship program that supports Minnesota-based, emerging artists working experimentally at the intersection of art and technology, with a focus on practices that are social, virtual and/or participatory. The program is sponsored by the Jerome Foundation.

In September 2008 a jury consisting of Liz Armstrong (The Minneapolis Institute of Art), Steve Dietz (Northern Lights), Ben Heywood (Soap Factory), Ana Serrano (Canadian Film Center Media Lab), and Anu Vikram (Headlands Residency Program) selected 6 artists for AOV fellowships. This exhibition represents the culmination of the fellowship year.

Artists

Avye Alexandres

Once, 2009
interactive environment
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/alexandres/

Once is a mixed media, immersive installation designed to function as memory might. Placing the viewer on the edge of an ambiguous, changing and ephemeral space, the work raises questions about the placement, origins, and malleability of our memories. It also highlights the difficulty we have controlling our surroundings and recollections.

Aniccha Arts

Cloud Turn, 2009
DVD
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/aniccha-arts/

For the Weisman Art Museum, Pramila Vasudevan, founder and director of Annicha Arts presents documentation of the interactive dance performance Cloud Turn presented at Pillsbury House Theater in early June 2009.

Cloud Turn is a part of Aniccha Arts’s larger multi-media endeavor The Weather Vein Project. Created in a time of publicly acknowledged climate crisis, the work investigates the human desire and need for weather modification. The Weather Vein Project is based on a series of workshops with students and the general public throughout the Twin Cities as well as an online discussion site exploring the arising concern about global water scarcity.

Aniccha Arts / Mark Fox

Weather Oracle, 2009
interactive sound sculpture

This interactive sculpture is a part of Annicha Arts’s, The Weather Vein Project. Designed to be shown in the entryway to the performance of the interactive dance performance, Cloud Turn, the sculpture responds sonically to the audience.

Annicha Arts

wecanchangetheweather.org, 2009
blog

The web log accessible on this computer explores and documents our weather memories in an age of increasing warmth. Developed by Pramila Vasudevan, founder and director of Aniccha Arts, primary contributors are Shalini Gupta, Cecilia Martinez, and Mark Seeley with workshop contributors Piotr Szyhalski from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Ian Rhodes and Martha Johnson from Highland Park Junior High School.

Christopher Baker

Murmur Study, 2009
Thermal printers, paper, Twitter
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/baker/

Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update, which have become a kind of digital small talk or contemporary coffee klatsch. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal—often emotional—expression might give us pause.

This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on expressions(?) such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.

Murmur Study is an ongoing collaboration with Márton András Juhász and the Kitchen Budapest. Baker, a former research scientist, is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Time and Interactivity program and currently has a residency fellowship at The Kitchen in Budapest.

Christopher Baker

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome), 2009
cell phones

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome) is a kinetic sculpture that considers the subtle, often-subconscious ways that mobile communication technologies shape our senses. The title references the recently discovered Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome—a syndrome wherein mobile phone users become hyper-attentive to their mobile devices, often experiencing phantom ringing sensations even in the absence of incoming calls or messages. This work carefully orchestrates the vibrations of over 500 mobile phones to produce a familiar yet quietly disturbing cacophony.

Kevin Obsatz

The Gate to the Enclosure, 2009
four-screen video installation
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/obsatz/

The Gate to the Enclosure is a four-screen video installation that challenges the practice of restricting televisual communication to “keyhole” or “vignette” dynamics, in which the author of the work is both safely hidden behind his/her framing choices, and in complete, unilateral control of the experience of the viewer. For this installation, the artist built a four-camera video apparatus that captures a 360-degree field of vision. He then experimented with it in various environments, both as a static observer and as a form that can be manipulated in three-dimensional space.

In The Gate to the Enclosure the dynamics of the relationship between cameraperson, apparatus and filmed “subject” are very different than those at play in the traditional act of filming with a single camera. The keyhole effect is shattered as notions of inside and outside the field of view are blurred. As a result, the viewers become observer and observed, subject and object, positioned on the same side of the lens, a part of the same landscape.

Andrea Steudel

Mobile Shadow Projection Theater, 2009
DVD
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/steudel/

Andrea Steudel, collaborating with different artists, such as Angela Olson of the Open Eye Figure Theater, Jetpack Puppeteer Karen Haselman and for a performance at the Weisman, David Steinman with John Keston, created a portable projection system tailored for shadow puppetry. She then deployed it ubiquitously in the public sphere in performances of varying formality. This looping DVD shows video documentation of her urban performances over the course of the fellowship.

Krista Kelley Walsh

Public Eye Action, 2009
computer, graphite on paper
http://northern.lights.mn/programs/aov/walsh/

Public Eye Action is a series of site-specific visual events created for public webcams. The events initiated by the artist and undertaken before the cameras humorously hijack these “eyes in the sky” to expose their persistent presence in our daily lives. For the Weisman installation Kelley Walsh has installed a computer monitor linked to a webcam positioned on the University’s Northrop Mall and will work with the community to stage actions there. In addition, Kelley Walsh has installed 5 drawings she created from selected images captured from web cameras.

This article originally appeared in the catalog for the Greater Minneapolis 08 show at the Soap Factory this fall. Curated by Patty Healy McMeans and Christopher Dela Pole, the exhibit showcased the work of 22 Minneapolis-based artists. The six artists discussed here each practice a form of public and/or performative artmaking.

Public/Private

Theorist Sven Lutticken writes that the role of the contemporary artist is one of “permanent public self-performance.” This intimidating endgame isn’t reserved only for artists, though; Lutticken further argues that all of us, in one role or another, so long as it’s a role played in our service economy, exist under pressures of a “merciless economic drive to perform,” to bring our personalities into play in our every interaction, to “make it personal.” No matter what our role, no matter what we’re paid.

This fundamental invasion of privacy begs the question: who are our private selves? Where are they allowed to exist and develop, if in so many moments we are expected – and expect ourselves – to “act”? The self can get lost in its own publicity.

When we think about issues that crystallize contemporary dynamics between public and private life, we might first think of, say, surveillance of our private records and activities in semi-public realms like the Internet, your credit card company’s databases, or the halls of government. Perhaps most often, we think of the distinction between public and private in terms of the visible and the invisible. We think of the public self as the self seen by others, consciously shown to others, and of the private self as the one we might be able to hide – the self with bad habits, the self of the inner monologue, or the self who, rather than performing, can just “be.” The word “public” also calls to mind networks and structures, institutions, macro-level politics and “the big picture.” These concepts usually have their pairs in the private sphere – thus, we have public parks and private yards; institutional buildings and homes; religion and religious belief; parades and diaries. But people conduct their private lives in public parks – and at all times, everywhere. In fact, you can’t actually stop enacting you private self, anywhere, ever. Assembly and solitude each contain the one and the multitude. The conventional public/private dichotomy thus breaks down.

Many of the artists in Pay Attention: GM08 make work from a standpoint that acknowledges we cannot avoid this constant self-performance; at the same time, their work encourages us to consider that we are potential performers of ideas and selves we’ve yet to enact or imagine. These artists concern themselves with an examination of behavior via performance and the creation of performative circumstances. Many perform their own work, and some include accomplices; others do not perform their work but, instead, lay the foundation for work that’s only completed through the viewer’s witting or unwitting participation. Still others capture and comment on the kinds of performances enacted daily by all of us, producing not new behaviors but reflections on our current ones.

Performance and performative artworks often enact incursions of “private” behavior in the “public” realm. Seeing someone risk their reputation in public by doing something considered “private” can have profound effects on the viewer; we share a basic need to witness another’s life (so that we may affirm our own), to identify with another. But beyond addressing the requirements of catharsis and identification, contemporary performative artworks often showcase how things “public” and “private” are not locked in opposition to each other but, rather, exist on a continuum. A dynamic opposition can exist between public and private (ever stand next to your window, naked?), but the actions we assign to each of these categories can also be made to trade places, and to great effect.

The artists in GM08 engage us in the performative process, making public – and obvious – the quotidian habits, situations, and constructs of the life lived along this public/private continuum that often go unnoticed. Providing the context for thought, action, and interaction, these works often invite our co-authorship: we are instrumental in making this art be art at all.

Marcus Young

Marcus Young’s trio of public actions for this show, entitled collectively “This is Not Here,” takes place in real time and in public spaces that are not within the Soap Factory itself. These performances are made for those who happen to be there, witnessing as would people who hear trees falling in the woods; they are complicit in that experience, and so it happens.

Theater for the Ear, 2008

In one solo work, Young smiles continuously while walking very slowly in a public space – in this case, an art institution’s exhibition halls. This deceptively simple act tweaks our presumptions about what kinds of behavior are “appropriate” in public: slow walking can interrupt the flow of foot-traffic (bad), draw attention to you (also bad), and may indicate that you’re not feeling well (a plea for help?). But pairing it with smiling turns the walk into what appears to be a vivid expression of the “private” self – it reads as a spiritual exercise. We soon realize we want the smile to be an expression of an inner state, making this long walk (long in time, if not in space) meaningful, if still utterly inscrutable. Again, our desire makes us complicit in the performance. The artist may experience this as an act of endurance, but we want this to be a gesture of human freedom, a willful inscription of the private on public territory.

In another work, which he refers to as “Theater for the Ear,” Young and his cohorts approach unwitting strangers and whisper in their ears. The text whispered addresses the listener directly; the impropriety of being whispered to by a stranger in a public place only heightens the excitement inspired by this direct address. Whatever else is said, the form of address alone stuns the listener with its refusal to abide by social convention.

These acts transform their institutional sites from spaces of benign reception and contemplation into dynamic, interactive zones where questions can be leveled directly at the audience. Bodily participation is required by these pieces, as opposed to mere scopophilia; we comprehend that meanings are made between things, between ourselves and the work, rather than by the things themselves. This necessarily makes us aware of our co-production of meaning.

For Young’s piece “Don’t you feel it too?”, a dance happening recurrently in public spaces for GM08 and premiering during the Republican National Convention, the call for performers says, “the only qualification is a willingness to say hello to your personal awkwardness and accompanying happiness,” as well as promising the kind of joy that can only accompany “nonstandardized behavior.” The expectations of Young’s work may make us self-conscious to begin with, but also self-reflexive, more aware of our own thresholds, expectations – and options. His work produces a context for witnessing and acknowledgement that extends beyond the usual expectations of the spectacle – our internal, private monologues about the work and how we’re allowing ourselves to interact with it become part of the work itself.

Julia Kouneski

Julia Kouneski’s work also encourages unusual and delicate interactions between humans, often with a mechanized intermediary. Having worked with the breath using motion sensors in the past, she now engages collective breath with her two-person balloons. Altered to have two valves each, these balloons can and must be shared with others in order to inflate properly. She herself has asked strangers to share them with her, documenting the results, and throughout GM08, the balloons are being given away to visitors at the gallery entrance. These strange objects present the recipient with multiple questions and options: First, what is this? And what will I do with it? Am I brave enough to try it? Will I use it here, or somewhere else? With a friend? A stranger? Once you decide to try it, more options emerge for its specific use: to share one breath and allow it to deflate, a momentary communal lung? Or to share it to the point of inflating it completely and tying it off, saving the breath to fashion it semi-permanently? Either outcome is possible, but it’s the experience of vulnerability and shared effort that is most affecting. In making what could be called an “emergent object,” Kouneski has created an object that, as we fondle it, makes us nervous with possibility.

Shared Breath Situations, 2008

In performative works, there is often a call to join in – an expectation that you, too, will perform beyond your normal range. Kouneski’s requests for your participation put your private self on the spot in public – how will you react? Will you do what’s requested of you? And then what? Although overt performative expectations of the viewer – to participate in a work and make an artist’s plastic initiatives come alive – can be exhausting, and can create determined resistance in an audience who would rather keep its reactions to itself, full participants may be rewarded for their responsiveness and instrumentality; being asked, essentially, to come out and play, disarming as that is, is nothing if not exciting, and it’s not every day you get to blow a balloon with a stranger.

Tony Sunder

Tony Sunder for a time conducted free tours at the Walker Art Center for anyone who took him up on his offer. He had never been and was not at the time employed by or affiliated with the Walker. This performed standing-in for the institutional voice put his followers’ trust of the institution on the line, highlighting both their need to put their knowledge in the hands of an external voice and their willingness to play with other perspectives by allowing a man off the street to conduct them through the museum. For this show, he has hand-crafted gallery benches and placed them himself around the Soap Factory in relation to other artworks. Their placement in front of certain works (and not others) indicates what we are meant to contemplate most deeply. Will you take the familiar hint, sit down and spend time with what the bench angles your attention toward? Or will you notice the power play involved, and choose not to sit at all? By interacting bodily, even performatively, with these benches, you become accountable for your private experience of accepting – or not – the pre-conceived valuations their physical placement connotes.

Free Tours (Walker Art Center), 2007

The full intentions of Sunder’s works – performances and objects alike – fly beneath the radar, but sly as they are, they create an acute awareness in the observer that you must, in relation to these works (and, by extension, every work of art you see), choose either to refuse its invitation, or to submit to it. As interactive stratagems, they make you aware of the power inherent in where you choose to direct your attention.

Jonathan Gomez Whitney

Jonathan Gomez Whitney’s sleight-of-hand installations, in which he both performs and invites others to perform, are rarely what they first seem. Take, for instance, his weekly poker game set up in a Soap Factory storage room for the duration of the show. Word-of-mouth is the only publicity for the game and its enlistment of players, and this alone generates public interest. Poker playing is a normative behavior, but playing it in a semi-secretly released room in the public space of an art gallery takes the game that’s normally played in a home, bar, or casino, and makes of its behaviors something else. Are we no longer just playing poker? Are we now “performing” poker? The set-up allows for several observers, as well, so now there’s an audience to watch, to see the players’ hands. Perhaps nothing better defines the tension between public and private than the concept of an “open secret,” and an open secret is just what Gomez Whitney has created, functionally and experientially. It’s an engagement of the public, but one that’s stealthy, and privately accomplished.

hand-built poker table, 2008

Gomez Whitney further feigns a full invitation by setting up an altered, amplified organ in the space of the gallery. It looks inviting, but if you played it (and you’re not allowed to), the sounds that come out would not be standard ones. Jonathan engages in physics experiments on musical instruments that result more in poetic meaning than harmonic sound. He performs a song with the organ on opening night about broken-up friendships, and what remains afterward is, yes, the organ itself – but also, drawn out as long as is technically possible, its post-performance hum. The ongoing buzz of the instrument is a reminder of the object’s energetic performance potential, but more importantly of the energetic hum stemming from all the potential performances awaiting our enactment.

Ali Momeni

Ali Momeni produces much of his work in the public sphere, creating machines and interactive systems that allow for evanescent, experiential art making. His work often animates public space through large-scale projections that embrace elements of chance. He currently heads a team of artists called Minneapolis Art on Wheels, a mobile art project wherein bikes equipped with a high-powered projector, laptop, sound system, and power source can project art wherever the bikes can be ridden. The projected content, often created live and in real time by artist-built computer programs, is frequently co-created by the random audience accumulating around the bikes.

Wall Whisperer, 2008

Momeni’s interest in “emergent behaviors” – behaviors that arise from the entirety of a system that could not arise from its individual parts – leads him to experiment with system-building on both material and immaterial, even social levels. He has created projections in which tiny movements made by his fingers create and control the movements of large-scale visual phenomena; he also built a sculptural installation where the experimental movements made by a person encased in a giant joystick ultimately, through computer synthesis of the joystick’s movements, created club-worthy dance music. These works of translation from intuitive, self-directed physical movement to technically advanced aesthetic output are at the same time translating the performance of private-scale, individual acts into socially-participatory phenomena, enlarging the dynamic range of individual actions in the public sphere. In all of these projects, by setting up a system and seeing what it does – and what people do in response to it – Momeni makes space for new possibilities for social and aesthetic action, and for performances that surprise artist and audience alike.

Chris Baker

Much of Chris Baker’s work holds a mirror to our most mundane performative practices, and in it we contemplate their pathos. Most of his works for this show focus on the confessional, exhibitionistic habits of online bloggers and vloggers. In the piece entitled “It’s been awhile since I last wrote…,” a single LED traces the title sentence, in apparently handwritten script, across a photoluminescent wall, then fades – a process that repeats, again and again. For anyone writing this sentence online (and many have), there’s a technological pathetic fallacy at work; it requires imagining that there is a “community” beyond and because of the blog. Simply because we’ve trained a camera on ourselves or opened a public diary, we begin to imagine ourselves the subject of careful surveillance. The script’s fade to invisibility reinforces how little impact this level of private visibility makes on any larger public fact. But its endless return signals the inevitability of our basic need to be heard. Even those who’ve only written such a line in a private journal feel a twinge of recognition; as Baker points out, the sentence calls to mind both the need to be attended to by others and the estrangement (from the moment and from others) that’s inherent to writing and to communication in general.

Hello, World!, 2008

In his work “Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise,” one confronts a massive projection of thousands of youtube videos of people vlogging, alone, staring into the camera and externalizing their inner monologue. Its title refers to the utopic fantasy inherent to technological advancement (“Hello World!” is the name of the first program computer science students learn to build) as well as to the utopic desire inherent in posting one’s “self” on youtube. Baker aimed to choose first-timers – those with low production values who volunteer a lot of personal information (some of which can be made out in the 30-track audio for the piece). They seem lost, looking down from the camera every two or three seconds to see themselves on their own computer screen in a circular, self-referential gaze – and it takes them awhile to figure out how to present themselves; we literally watch them get their “act” together. These individuals seem both hyper-aware of themselves and totally un-self-conscious, fidgeting while releasing stream-of-consciousness narration. Taking it all in, we move from empathy to estrangement, because finally, there is an irresolvable vastness of content to this much-multiplied self-presentation. For vloggers, there is no interaction with an actual listener, only with an imagined receiver, and the seemingly infinite number of potential human connections to which the piece refers remain, at best, potential.

At first glance, Baker’s works seem to lampoon the narcissism and futility of contemporary technological gestures toward interconnection, deflating their apparent arrogance and naivete. But, as the owner of the hand that writes the fading, recurrent sentence, he too, he seems to admit, performs his “self” – as have any of us who’ve ever recorded our thoughts in first-person.

Much as the many and multiplying international art fairs serve to illustrate broader cultural trends at any given moment, the Olympic Games, occurring as they do every four years and produced as a televised spectacle, can act as a barometer of current cultural practices and norms. This year, there were the usual unscripted interactions between athletes and coaches, reporters grilling athletes post-competition, and pre-recorded bio videos between events to tell athletes’ personal stories. But the moment that seemed most indicative of our current collapse of private and public life was the moment we got to listen in on the US Womens’ gymnastics team huddling to talk strategy. They were surrounded not by reporters but by multiple cameras, all of which lingered on them, without voice-over or analysis from on-air commentators, for the length of their conversation. The gymnasts seemed not annoyed by but actually prepared for this, fully accepting of and ready for it. It was as if the cameras weren’t even there. Or, perhaps more startling, it was as if they were there.

Such performance of the self is nothing new in the era of “reality” television, youtube, Facebook, and all the other players in the genre of technological self-promotion. The task of the artist, in a world where such media incursions are the norm, may be to continue to sort out our options for participation and action beyond the spectacular.

Even in moments of public self-performance, there is a fundamental exchange between the performed self and the private self who monitors what gets said and what doesn’t, what’s shown and what isn’t. The performative artworks in GM08 challenge the private self; even when they request a more public response, they offer an opportunity for development – even for engaged argument – to the private self, the self whose existence no market can dictate but who all sorts of markets would like to exploit. Art that enacts unusual behaviors, asks unusual behaviors of us, or that recontextualizes our seemingly mundane behaviors makes room for us to consider that we may, in fact, want something more from ourselves than we’re presently accomplishing. And sometimes, the immediate rewards of opening ourselves to experience these behavioral works can open the door to that self-revision.

Sarah Petersen is a multidisciplinary artist living in Minneapolis